Feeling is a Balancing Act

I never considered myself depressed or particularly susceptible to it until the last year or two – other than I did almost intentionally hurt myself pretty badly when I was in high school. I remember being in the kitchen late one night with a knife to my wrist, just standing there, staring. I don’t know why I didn’t follow through, but I thank God for whatever made me stop. I had down times, sure, but I didn’t think they were that bad – certainly not any worse than what anybody else I knew was experiencing or going through. Likewise, I was never and have never been diagnosed with depression, although I have several close relatives who have.

At any rate, it seems enlightenment has created the capacity for more depression in me. What I mean by that is I’ve noticed that as I open more and more, as I come to know myself better and better, as I get in touch with more and more of my own heart, I also feel more frequent bouts of depression.

There are days when feeling the pain and ugliness of the world overwhelms me to the point that I just wish I could step off the planet into the nothingness of space. I long for the dark. I long to feel nothing anymore. To just stop. To just … NOT BE.

In the interest of being 100% honest with you, gentle reader, I have to admit that I still have abstract thoughts sometimes of just checking out of life. What if I just turn my car into the concrete barrier of the expressway? I have no intention of doing this, but honestly, the thoughts do arise.

Maybe it’s not just an increase in depression. The more I think about it, it’s just an overall increase in sensitivity. I’ve always been extremely sensitive, but before I healed from my past childhood trauma and all the stuff that came with it, I was numb to a lot because numbness was what I needed just to survive.

The opening of those blocks set loose all that pent-up sensitivity, and it’s bloomed in me with a vengeance.

I find this mostly a blessing, but in times of trial and pain, it feels like a curse. We’ve all heard the expression that there is no free lunch, and that everything costs something; in college economics one of the biggest and most eye-opening lessons to me was that everything in life has an opportunity cost. If you do A, then it will cost you B because you can’t do or have both. And so on.

It’s the same with enlightenment, with coming to know myself better and more deeply, with the increase in awareness and consciousness. I think there’s a prevailing misconception that to be enlightened means no more pain, no more problems. This is just patently false. If anything, my eyes see more now, so much more – suffering and pain and ugliness that has always been there, but I was never open to it. Never saw it because I was bent purely on simple survival.

The universe in which we live is bigger than just survival. Indeed, even the process of becoming more enlightened, pursuing more truth and awareness is anything but easy.

In reality, a spiritual awakening and journey is brilliantly illustrated here:

But I digress.

Anyway, spiritual teacher Alan Watts has written and spoken about this, but I never fully appreciated just how dead-on accurate he was until I experienced it for myself. His words sum it up best:

“There is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” –Alan Watts

So I know that I can only have these dark feelings as a balance to the light feelings. I understand this, and I appreciate the sense it makes in both a natural and spiritual sense.

But my God - the pain, when it comes, scares me in its intensity and darkness.

It feels like … clutching hands that grab me and try to pull me down. I try very hard to remember that this, too, shall pass – that these feelings are temporary and eventually will give way. And that the pain is only half the story.

Because the other part is joy – increasing consciousness and deepening my spiritual self leads to indescribable joy as well. I find joy in simple, small, unobtrusive places that I think many other people don’t even notice. And I rejoice in those moments of joy – they are sharper, sweeter, and more brilliant than I have ever known before. They carry a power and a fullness that sometimes takes my breath away – I literally gasp with the warmth and depth of the feeling.

I’m not used to balancing these two states, though. It seems I live, right now, in a world of extremes. I slide deeply into the pain and depression, the darkness and ugliness of the world, then turn around and slide way up to the other side where I feel such infinite, huge, overwhelming joy I seem to burst with it.

Maybe I struggle more with the dark times because of the survival mechanism of numbness I felt when I was still in healing mode. Going from numbness to feeling everything so quickly has been disorienting to make a profound understatement. Frequently I look at how I handle the dark times now, and fight not to be embarrassed by how majorly I lose my shit. Luckily I have an incredible best friend who keeps me from the brink time after time, who sees me and witnesses me, holds my head above water until I can do it, once again, on my own.

With time, perhaps, I will learn to manage and moderate this sliding scale of sensitivity I seem to be on right now.

I have to be honest, though, and say it’s much easier to manage joy than it is to manage the darkness, depression, and pain. It’s much easier to be full of love and warmth to the point of bursting than it is to be dragged down by the blackness of violence, sadness, death, inhumanity.

I’ve never realized before how much freaking ENERGY it takes to be negative, to deal in drama, to feel darkness and despair – it is physically, mentally, and emotionally EXHAUSTING.

In a way I’m so grateful I wasn’t capable of feeling this much back in the early days of my healing journey. I’m grateful for the relative numbness I had at some of those times, because I think if I felt the full depth of the blackness to come, I might have done something I couldn’t take back, or hurt myself pretty badly in an effort to escape the pain and oppression of those feelings.

One more way I see how the universe truly does send us what we need ONLY when we are ready for it. I wasn’t ready to feel back then. I am now – as overwhelming and chaotic and extreme as it is for me right now, I know that I am ready for this. Otherwise it wouldn’t be on my doorstep.

But this lesson is multifaceted, as so many of them are. Here I learn not only to feel, but to balance those feelings. And like the classic image of a tight-rope walker at a circus, it’s serious and intense work. I have no doubt it will be worth it in the end, as all these lessons are.

So here’s to the dark that comes with the light.